“…The investigation of the interactions between metal ions and simple sugars can improve the understanding of metal ion interactions with sugar residues of biologically important compounds and, consequently, the physiological role of metal ions, which needs to assign the binding hydroxyl or other groups, the changes of hydrogen bonds, and also to characterize the metal ion coordination of carbohydrates monitoring the ligand conformation and configuration changes forced by the complexation processes. Erythritol, galactitol, inositol, cyclohexanetriols and ribose, and so forth are often used as simple models to study the interactions between metal ions and carbohydrates. − Different ligands have various coordination modes, and one ligand may have several coordination modes: for example, galactitol may be used as two three-hydroxyl-group donor or two bidentate ligands to form a chain structure; or it may coordinate to four metal ions with its O-1 to one metal ion, O-2, -3 to the second metal ion, O-4, -5 with the third metal ion, and O-6 to the fourth metal ion to form a network structure. − Erythritol has four hydroxyl groups, and it may be used as three hydroxyl group donor or two bidentate ligands. − In this paper, new topological structures have been observed for lanthanide chloride and nitrate-erythritol complexes. Because single crystals of metal-sugar complexes are difficult to prepare, IR spectroscopy is a useful method to deduce unknown structures, so here the relationship between IR spectroscopy and structures was also discussed.…”